Word: salvadore
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When President Reagan took office in 1981, his main foreign policy concern was to prevent El Salvador from going Red. While he took care to maintain a charade of democracy in that country, our policy seems designed to create chaos. First the CIA began to support the right-wing death squad violence that, between 1981 and 1985, left 60,000 suspected insurgents and union members dead. When the Reagan administration came under fire for its support of the death squads, it sponsored the elections which brought Jose Napolean Duarte to power in 1983. Duarte was supposed to have found...
Duarte's "democracy" has presided over the slide of El Salvador into economic turmoil and all-out civil war. Duarte received hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. economic and military aid, supposedly to shore up the government economically and politically. This money successfully funded Duarte's bombing of the FMLN/FDR-held countryside, but failed miserably to bring any sort of economic stability to his country...
...right, the left, and the center in El Salvador are all tired of Duarte's leadership, and his days as president are numbered. In the last election, Duarte's party lost its majority in the parliament to the rightist ARENA party, whose leader Roberto D'Aubuisson is personally connected to the death squads. It looks as if D'Aubuisson may carry the presidential elections later this year. This would certainly destroy any talk of "democracy" in El Salvador...
Last week a delegation from the Washington-based International Center for Development Policy, a left-of-center think tank, paid a private visit to the ravaged country. Robert E. White, a former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, headed the tour. Over the span of a week, the group visited Kabul and Mazar-i- Sharif, a surprisingly peaceful city of more than 100,000 people on Afghanistan's border with the Soviet Union. One stop on the I.C.D.P. tour was a large, blue-tiled mosque, where about 1,500 men listened as a stooped, aged mullah read from the Koran. When...
...formal briefing paper on "promoting real security" does not even mention in passing the need to counter Soviet mischief in the Third World. In Central America, Jackson would go far beyond cutting off funds to the contras; he would cease military assistance to the guerrilla-plagued governments of El Salvador and Guatemala because they are "waging war . . . against their own people." Not only does Jackson argue that "Western Europe should be responsible for its own conventional defense," he also appears sympathetic to unilateral cuts in the American nuclear arsenal in the frail hope that the Soviets would cut theirs...